The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by bio-accident and social-chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

Whatever dangerous practices you allow the government to carry out
now—whether it’s in the name of national security or protecting
America’s borders or making America great again—rest assured, these same
practices can and will be used against you when the government decides
to set its sights on you.

We’ve been having this same debate about the perils of government
overreach for the past 50-plus years, and still we don’t seem to learn,
or if we learn, we learn too late.

For too long now, the American people have allowed their personal
prejudices and politics to cloud their judgment and render them
incapable of seeing that the treatment being doled out by the
government’s lethal enforcers has remained consistent, no matter the
threat.

All of the excessive, abusive tactics employed by the government
today—warrantless surveillance, stop and frisk searches, SWAT team
raids, roadside strip searches, asset forfeiture schemes, private
prisons, indefinite detention, militarized police, etc.—will eventually
be meted out on the general populace.

At that point, when you find yourself in the government’s crosshairs,
it will not matter whether your skin is black or yellow or brown or
white; it will not matter whether you’re an immigrant or a citizen; it
will not matter whether you’re rich or poor; it will not matter whether
you’re Republican or Democrat; and it certainly won’t matter who you
voted for in the last presidential election.

At that point—at the point you find yourself subjected to
dehumanizing, demoralizing, thuggish behavior by government bureaucrats
who are hyped up on the power of their badges and empowered to detain,
search, interrogate, threaten and generally harass anyone they see
fit—remember you were warned.

Take Roger Stone, one of President Trump’s longtime supporters, for example.

This is a guy accused of witness tampering, obstruction of justice and lying to Congress.

“After his arraignment on witness tampering, obstruction and lying to Congress, a rattled Stone was quoted as saying 29 agents ‘pounded on the door,’ pointed automatic weapons at him and ‘terrorized’ his wife and dogs.
Stone was taken away in handcuffs, the sixth associate of President
Trump to be indicted in Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe into
Russian meddling in the 2016 election. All the charges have been related
to either lying or tax evasion, with no evidence of so-called
‘collusion’ with Russia emerging to date.”

Overkill? Sure.

Yet another example of government overreach and brutality? Definitely.

Payton, a 7-year-old black Labrador retriever, and 4-year-old Chase, also a black Lab, were shot and killed after a SWAT team mistakenly raided the mayor’s home while searching for drugs. Police shot Payton four times. Chase was shot twice,
once from behind as he ran away. “My government blew through my doors
and killed my dogs. They thought we were drug dealers, and we were
treated as such. I don’t think they really ever considered that we
weren’t,” recalls
Mayor Cheye Calvo, who described being handcuffed and interrogated for
hours—wearing only underwear and socks—surrounded by the dogs’ carcasses
and pools of the dogs’ blood.

If these raids are becoming increasingly common and widespread, you
can chalk it up to the “make-work” philosophy, in which you assign
at-times unnecessary jobs to individuals to keep them busy or employed.
In this case, however, the make-work principle is being used to justify
the use of sophisticated military equipment and, in the process, qualify
for federal funding.

SWAT teams originated as specialized units dedicated to defusing
extremely sensitive, dangerous situations. They were never meant to be
used for routine police work such as serving a warrant.

Frequently justified as vital tools necessary to combat terrorism and
deal with rare but extremely dangerous criminal situations, such as
those involving hostages, SWAT teams—which first appeared on the scene
in California in the 1960s—have now become intrinsic parts of federal
and local law enforcement operations, thanks in large part to
substantial federal assistance and the Pentagon’s 1033 military surplus
recycling program, which allows the transfer of military equipment,
weapons and training to local police for free or at sharp discounts.

As the role of paramilitary forces has expanded to include involvement in nondescript police work targeting nonviolent
suspects, the mere presence of SWAT units has actually injected a level
of danger and violence into police-citizen interactions that was not
present as long as these interactions were handled by traditional
civilian officers.

Where this becomes a problem of life and death for Americans is when
these militarized SWAT teams are assigned to carry out routine law
enforcement tasks.

No longer reserved exclusively for deadly situations, SWAT teams are
now increasingly being deployed for relatively routine police matters
such as serving a search warrant, with some SWAT teams being sent out as
much as five times a day.

A California SWAT team drove an armored Lenco Bearcat into Roger Serrato’s yard,
surrounded his home with paramilitary troops wearing face masks, threw a
fire-starting flashbang grenade into the house in order, then when
Serrato appeared at a window, unarmed and wearing only his shorts, held
him at bay with rifles. Serrato died of asphyxiation from being trapped
in the flame-filled house. Incredibly, the father of four had done
nothing wrong. The SWAT team had misidentified him as someone involved
in a shooting.

Equally outrageous was the four-hour SWAT team raid on a California high school,
where students were locked down in classrooms, forced to urinate in
overturned desks and generally terrorized by heavily armed, masked
gunmen searching for possible weapons that were never found.

These incidents are just the tip of the iceberg.

What we are witnessing is an inversion of the police-civilian relationship.

Rather than compelling police officers to remain within
constitutional bounds as servants of the people, ordinary Americans are
being placed at the mercy of militarized police units.

This is what happens when paramilitary forces are used to conduct
ordinary policing operations, such as executing warrants on nonviolent
defendants.

Among those federal agencies laying claim to their own law enforcement divisions are the State Department, Department of Education, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service, to name just a few.
In fact, it says something about our reliance on the military that
federal agencies having nothing whatsoever to do with national defense
now see the need for their own paramilitary units.

SWAT teams have even on occasion conducted multiple, sequential raids
on wrong addresses or executed search warrants despite the fact that
the suspect is already in police custody. Police have also raided homes
on the basis of mistaking the presence or scent of legal substances for
drugs. Incredibly, these substances have included tomatoes, sunflowers,
fish, elderberry bushes, kenaf plants, hibiscus, and ragweed.

As you can see, all too often, botched SWAT team raids have resulted
in one tragedy after another for the residents with little consequences
for law enforcement.

Unfortunately, judges tend to afford extreme levels of deference to
police officers who have mistakenly killed innocent civilians but do not
afford similar leniency to civilians who have injured police officers
in acts of self-defense.

Even homeowners who mistake officers for robbers can be sentenced for
assault or murder if they take defensive actions resulting in harm to
police.

Drug warrants, for instance, are typically served by paramilitary
units late at night or shortly before dawn. Unfortunately, to the
unsuspecting homeowner—especially in cases involving mistaken identities
or wrong addresses—a raid can appear to be nothing less than a violent
home invasion, with armed intruders crashing through their door. The
natural reaction would be to engage in self-defense. Yet such a
defensive reaction on the part of a homeowner, particularly a gun owner,
will spur officers to employ lethal force.

That’s exactly what happened to Jose Guerena,
the young ex-Marine who was killed after a SWAT team kicked open the
door of his Arizona home during a drug raid and opened fire. According
to news reports, Guerena, 26 years old and the father of two young
children, grabbed a gun in response to the forced invasion but never
fired. In fact, the safety was still on his gun when he was killed.
Police officers were not as restrained. The young Iraqi war veteran was
allegedly fired upon 71 times. Guerena had no prior criminal record, and
the police found nothing illegal in his home.

Aiyana Jones is
dead because of a SWAT raid gone awry. The 7-year-old was killed after a
Detroit SWAT team—searching for a suspect—launched a flash-bang grenade
into her family’s apartment, broke through the door and opened fire,
hitting the little girl who was asleep on the living room couch. The
cops weren’t even in the right apartment.

Exhibiting a similar lack of basic concern for public safety, a
Georgia SWAT team launched a flash-bang grenade into the house in which
Baby Bou Bou, his three sisters and his parents were staying. The grenade landed in the 2-year-old’s crib, burning a hole in his chest and leaving him with scarring that a lifetime of surgeries will not be able to easily undo.

The problems inherent in these situations are further compounded by
the fact that SWAT teams are granted “no-knock” warrants at high rates
such that the warrants themselves are rendered practically meaningless.

In the process, Americans are rendered altogether helpless and
terror-stricken as a result of these confrontations with the police.

Indeed, “terrorizing” is a mild term to describe the effect on those
who survive such vigilante tactics. “It was terrible. It was the most
frightening experience of my life. I thought it was a terrorist attack,”
said 84-year-old Leona Goldberg, a victim of such a raid.

Yet this type of “terrorizing” activity is characteristic of the culture that we have created.

If ever there were a time to de-militarize and de-weaponize local police forces, it’s now.

While we are now grappling with a power-hungry police state at the
federal level, the militarization of domestic American law enforcement
is largely the result of the militarization of local police forces,
which are increasingly militaristic in their uniforms, weaponry,
language, training, and tactics and have come to rely on SWAT teams in
matters that once could have been satisfactorily performed by
traditional civilian officers.

Yet American police forces were never supposed to be a branch of the
military, nor were they meant to be private security forces for the
reigning political faction.

Instead, they were intended to be an aggregation of countless local
police units, composed of citizens like you and me that exist for a sole
purpose: to serve and protect the citizens of each and every American
community.

As a result of the increasing militarization of the police in recent
years, however, the police now not only look like the military—with
their foreboding uniforms and phalanx of lethal weapons—but they
function like them, as well.

Thus, no more do we have a civilian force of peace officers entrusted
with serving and protecting the American people. Instead, today’s
militarized law enforcement officials have shifted their allegiance from
the citizenry to the state, acting preemptively to ward off any
possible challenges to the government’s power, unrestrained by the
boundaries of the Fourth Amendment.

As journalist Herman Schwartz observed, “The Fourth Amendment was
designed to stand between us and arbitrary governmental authority. For
all practical purposes, that shield has been shattered,
leaving our liberty and personal integrity subject to the whim of every
cop on the beat, trooper on the highway and jail official.”

Heavily armed police officers, the end product of the
government—federal, local and state—and law enforcement agencies having
merged, have become a “standing” or permanent army, composed of
full-time professional soldiers who do not disband.

Yet these permanent armies are exactly what those who drafted the
U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights feared as tools used by despotic
governments to wage war against its citizens.

This phenomenon we are experiencing with the police is what
philosopher Abraham Kaplan referred to as the law of the instrument,
which essentially says that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

In the scenario that has been playing out in recent years, we the
citizenry have become the nails to be hammered by the government’s
henchmen, a.k.a. its guns for hire, a.k.a. its standing army, a.k.a. the
nation’s law enforcement agencies.

Indeed, as I document in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People,
it is increasingly evident that militarized police armed with weapons
of war who are empowered to carry out pre-dawn raids on our homes, shoot
our pets, and terrorize our families have not made America any safer or
freer.

The sticking point is not whether Americans must see eye-to-eye on
the pressing issues of the day, but whether we can agree that no one
should be treated in such a fashion by their own government.